For my recent Ph.D. I decided to research the foundations of a new field, Systems Engineering that is just getting started in Academia. I had been invited to speak on the subject a couple of times at INCOSE when I was doing Software Engineering. So when I become a Systems Engineer myself I decided I really needed to look into this question deeply and that led to a Ph.D. in that subject. And I loved every minute of it, because it gave me the focus to actually accomplish something in that field. I just gave a talk at CSER2011 about my results a few weeks ago which you can hear on my research website and it was also about the next steps in my research program. But you can judge for yourself. See http://about.me/emergentdesign It has allowed me to get a credential in my chosen field. Personally I think in Systems Engineering there is not enough foundational research. It is mostly about teaching what is the traditional way of going about doing the Systems Engineering work in Aerospace companies. Start-ups are not going to be able to fund foundational research. Even big companies do not do that anymore. That will always be the province of universities, and it is needed if bodies of knowledge are to be built up in nascent fields like Systems Engineering. But what is needed is for star-tups to realize that graduates with Ph.D. holders are valuable even if their degree is in another field.

Let me tell you a story about that. One place I worked the director of Engineering was walking in to the building one day and he saw a new receptionist. So he talked to her and asked her about her background, and she said she had a Ph.D. in Biology. He said, what are you doing here with this job. She said it was all she could get. He took her up to his office and immediately gave her a raise and made her a Systems Engineer. This was long before I joined the company. When I got there she was the best Systems Engineer they had. And that is because biology teaches you to think about the whole system. She had learned that in her schooling, which is something that most Engineers do not understand. There is too much emphasis on Experience and not enough emphasis on capabilities. That is the only problem, companies need to draw widely from various disciplines. Those companies that do that will be more successful because there will be more variety in their workforce and I claim that this variety of disciplines working together leads to more creativity of the teams involved. The problem is that many bright people are locked out of fields because of the way that Industry worships the god of specialization just like the universities. Academia is Logos and Industry is Physus. This is the basic duality in our worldview. But they are both nihilistic extremes. No simple reform will solve the problem of Nihilism within the Western worldview.

All– I have created a similar service which is called OurTalk.net but I allow 2500 words in a post, because it is hard to say anything of philosophical significance with short messages. We will see how 1500 words works here. There are a smattering of conversations about Philosophy here on Namesake, but quite a few people with philosophy in their profile which is surprising. So I thought it would be a good idea to have one general conversation about philosophy so that those of us interested in philosophy could get to know each other. I am interested in Philosophy of Science but from a Continental Philosophy perspective. I study Ontology, and especially as it tells us something about the structure of the Western worldview. I answer a lot of questions on Quora that have to do with philosophy. See http://quora.com…t-Palmer, then I post http://OurTalk.net and a blog that reposts my messages athttp://think.net. In general my goal is to facilitate more serious conversation on the internet and that might be possible at these new services like Namesake and Quora. It seems to me that Namesake is much like Convore where I tried to set up some philosophy conversation sites as an adjunct to Quora but no one was interested. But they might be more interested in Namesake because it has a design much like that of Quora. I find that Quora is a bit stilted because there is no actual interaction going on there, so something that allows actual interaction is needed like Namesake. –Kent

http://Ourtalk.netConsidering Emergent Globalized Immediate Interaction. http://kdp.me #philosophy #thought #twitter #globalization — Now that there is a place where we can discuss things with a bit more leisure, it behooves us to begin thinking about this new media that we are engaged in so frenetically. The concept behind OurTalk.net is to leverage the technology for discussions of the meanings of the affairs that we find ourselves immersed in realtime as events occur on the ground rather than being mediated by Media. A world event occurs and we begin getting signs of it even before the media can react to tell us what is happening. And we begin to react ourselves in this world community before any organization, agency, or government even knows what is happening and can themselves react to the situation. Realtime response globally is a new concept, which unifies our world community in a way that it has not been presented previously in any media. We react to emergent events as they are occurring globally on a personal level, and we get reports from on the ground, and communicate with those on the ground immediately as events are unfolding. This is a new emergent phenomena itself, and I think will result in a paradigm change because it makes globalization an immediate phenomena that all of us can experience. OurTalk.net is a place where we can consider the implications of this paradigm change and other significant phenomena of our time in a thoughtful manner in keeping with the need for understanding in this time of rapid emergent technological change.

The think.net blog is open finally. Welcome. Up until this point there was a web page that directed you to the blog. That still exists at http://old.think.net. But now I have a hosting account and it is possible to have a site which is directly accessible. I think this will help motivate me to write on the blog more, since I will not be depending on other sites to host my blog. I have set up quite a few thinknet sites and I intend to use them for different purposes. But this will become the main site for reflections and thoughts. Thanks for dropping by.